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Unknown Lamer
on Monday April 02, 2012 @12:35PM
from the blast-from-the-past dept.

Last Thursday, the Sawfish window manager project announced the availability of 1.8.92. The release brings several new features. Highlights include: support for MATE and Razor-Qt (along with better GNOME and KDE support), better edge action support, and improvements to the theming system. A new OS X style single window mode has been added, along with a really interesting shade stack feature:
"Added shade-stack feature. It provides an alternative to iconify-window. Instead of iconifying a window or minizing it to a tray, the windows get shaded and sorted in a stack starting from the top-left corner (the number of columns can be changed). Combined with auto-unshade this offers — possibly — a better way of interacting with windows which aren't required at the moment. Original code by Luke Gorrie. [Christopher Bratusek]"
This is the first release candidate for the new stable 1.9 series.

Added `single-window-mode'. Basically this feature is known from OS-X, though it's implemented in a more strict way. The `single-window-mode' window should get all of the users attention.

Single window mode hasn't been a standard feature of OS X since the public beta in 2000. I thought at first that it was referring to fullscreen mode in Lion, but it appears to really be talking about the original single window mode, which had a purple button in the upper right corner of a window before the button was turned

One could point out the intention may lie in the semantics of standard vs default. I'm just throwing in a, "One could." I don't own up to nothin'. My computer came with an operating system as part of the standard package, but I didn't like the default one they offered and replaced it with three Debian variants and an experiment with Gentoo (second version of stage 3 live CD was actually very impressive compared to the Ubuntu live CD of the same ye

Why we'd want sawfish is interesting. So its got a lispy config file. So does my "awesome window manager". Well awesome uses Lua which is vaguely distantly scheme inspired. Doesn't sound like much difference. So I'd want to use "awesome" because... or "sawfish" because...

The standard/. car analogy is this is like a new car model press release that primarily mentions our new car has four tires, in contrast to the toyota camry which has 4 wheels. Um, OK, thats really interesting.

And a fantastic "sawfish-config" program that gives you GUI access to just about every configurable option, from basic to really esoteric, including theme-specific options. That way, you don't have to know Lisp or Scheme(*) to configure it.

(*)Or rep, the Lisp implementation developed by John Harper for his Sawmill/Sawfish project. "rep" is an abbreviation for "read-evaluate-print", the loop that Lisp-ish languages use. The desire has been expressed on the Sawfish Wiki, and on the mailing list, to re-work Sawfish for a more standardized Lisp-ish language, probably Scheme.

Sort of. Arch, obviously does. There is a repo for fedora as well. I've used it, its nice but a little rough around the edges. The psuedo start button menu pop up thing, doesn't do the submenus right. Switching to a sub menu only works if you keep the mouse directly to the right of the selector. Most desktops will give you a little bit of wiggle room. That's pretty much my only complaint

I don't think Razor qt is ready for distro based off it. I use it on Gentoo and it's mostly functional, although rough around the edges in spots. For instance there's no feedback when clicking on icons, no volume control and there isn't a theme manager hooked into the gui. Aside from click feedback I really wish there was a way to bring up a run command dialog. I'm not sure what the development pace is, but I'm sure most of this stuff will be cleaned up within the next release or two.

Saw(fish/mill) was my favourite window manager years ago and I was upset when GNOME replaced it's official status with Metacity. It was a sad day when Eazel went bankrupt and John Harper went to work for Apple. He eventually abandoned this great work but as a FOSS project, it never dies. It becomes a stepping stone for the next generation of developers. Software development might be slower in the beginning but after a few years, FOSS is standing on the shoulders of giants and that will be a force that no single entity will be able to match.

It used to be my favorite window manager. Then, in one release, they removed nearly all the features I liked, or at least removed their options from the settings -- apparently they could still be set by using some regedit-like interface or something, I don't recall exactly, but making it simpler and easier to use was the apparent justification for making it incredibly more complicated and difficult to use. I stopped using it after that.

A bit more history:- in 2000 John Harper created sawfish,- in 2005 he abadoned it.- In 2007 he gave me full access to repository. Then I was officially a new sawfish developer. I revived sawfish and made few releases, mainly I brought back previously removed features (such as viewports). Also I concentrated on creating a useful wiki, that would allow everyone to easily submit patches. This wiki worked beyond all my expectations. We had 1 nice patch/feature per week for several years. There was actually a reason to make new sawfish release every three or four months. This work attracted more and more people to the community.- In year 2009 I passed lead to new developer Christopher Bratusek, who was one of the first to join after I got access permissions from John Harper- Currently I am amazed to see that in 2012 Christopher Bratusek is still doing great job

Let me paste here my slashdot post about sawfish, which I wrote some time ago.==I am using sawfish and ROX for over 15 years. I wouldn't change it for anything else. Even though my wife & sister & friends went through various generations KDE, gnome, unity and I learned how to use them (just for the sake of helping them). Still sawfish is the MOST powerful & fastest wm ever. And rox the lightest fm (file manager), but of course I use mc a lot (where I had submitted some patches too, especially with tree view of directories in another panel).

Imagine, that in sawfish you can even UNDO window actions (movement, resize, anything else). Assign different window properties per window type (frame(less) type, coordinates, size, placement strategy). You cannot even imagine how configurable are the keyboard shortcuts. No really. You. Can't. Imagine. Do you want have a totally mouseless workflow in multitude of opened windows? no problem. Want tablet? No problem. Window tabbing & window tling are the BASICS. Not some advance features. I haven't seen tabbing in any of those popular wms, like kwin or metacity.

There is no way I would even seriously consider any other wm than sawfish.

why rox? There's nothing lighter that gives me icons, a desktop and panels. My 8 cores and 32 GB of ram are better spent elsewhere than on clumsy desktop environment. I am running dozen of simultaneous calculations almost all memory is used, and sawfish is still as responsive as if there was nothing clogging the cores. I never stop to be amazed at that. Especially when I look at other people's PCs when they open just a few apps, and their desktop becomes so unresponsive that I would get mad.

This comfort also made me a little lazy to "clean up" my desktops. I have 24 viewports, they are all full of windows - betweeen 100 and 200 windows open (I guess about 150 right now). And they get dusty. After few months I discover some forgotten window on some viewport and it brings nice memories about what I was doing back then.== end paste

side note: Christopher thinks that my desktop is "old school" and outdated;) Mainly because I use plain old simple ROX instead of bells & whistles that are available right now. That's so funny for both of us. And it demonstrates how flexible sawfish is.

to be honest, I did a little cheat there: I run sawfish at -20 nice priority. Because I am really clogging all 8 CPUs with tons of calculations and other stuff (sometimes even too big for 32 GB of RAM that I have). And I do not tolerate any lag on the desktop.I made a special pager background for sawfish-pager so that all my 6*4=24 viewports are labelled, and it amazes my friends when they see how I switch between them:)I have three LCD screens: 1600x1200,1920x1200,1600x1200, all wonderfully working with xinerama (nvidia) and tuxonice hibernation (in case if power runs out, and I can't afford terminating my calculations, so better to hibernate). Heh, I like to brag about this setup sometimes, because I'm proud of how great it works:) Also this big screen setup lead me to find several obscure bugs in sawfish, and to fixing them.

It's not a coincidence that for all this great setup sawfish is the most important ingredient. Without sawfish I would feel like with my hands crippled, almost like without CLI.

Oh, I even got an offer from Richard Stallman to push making sawfish a default GNOME's WM. Though I had to refuse due to lack of time.. since I focus mainly on scientific research and then keeping alive the tools I like (e.g. sawfish).

He might be lurking here every now and then. Here's a funny Linuxcon Portland 2009 piece [youtube.com] where (pos 2:00) he is asked "so you actually read Slashdot?" and he shoots himself with a finger pistol.

I still have big sentiment to my first contact with sawfish. It was year 2000, and I was playing with my freshly installed debian box. I got rid of windows about 2 years earlier, and I was experimenting with everything that linux could have bring to me. I tried red-hat for 6 months, slackware, etc. Then I settled on debian. Next I was trying all desktop environments & window managers that dselect was showing in package listing (there was no aptitude at that time).

Do these things exist independently of the DE that uses/used them - in this case what - GNOME 1 or GNOME 2? Since people have moved from GNOME 2 to various options - LXDE/XFCE/Unity/GNOME3/KDE et al, how does this WM still remain relevant?